Oh come on, Greta Thunberg is the molly Cyrus of climate change. An Astro turf construct of a climate change advocacy corporation called “We dont have time” . Shes 16year old being manipulated by large and powerful international institutions and interests not some sort of child prodigy. Instead of giving these people press we should be shaming them for manipulating our kids and using teenagers as pawns. Don’t kid yourselves the climate change debate is about money, not saving the planet. Different industries are throwing their weight around different positions based on if they think more or less regulation is profitable for them. That’s really all that’s happening here.
The problem I have with this assessment, is that the scenario in which Greta is not a pawn, but someone that struck a chord, does not look any different. I have a seven-year-old daughter. It's not about money with me. I have done enough physics to understand that global warming is the probable outcome of our emissions. Money doesn't influence that. I sense that Greta has done the math, and is responding in a reasonable manner. I have an email group that has been meeting for the last 19 years. Every year we each present on a topic. This year I chose sea level rise as I wanted to educate myself more on it. I'm primarily interested in how much can be expected, and how quickly will it come. Here's two interesting things I learned: 1) Historical sea level tracks CO2 reliably. Going back 50M years, when CO2 has been around the current 412ppm, sea level averaged 24m +7/-15m (+9m to \+31m) over the current level. 2) In their 2007 sea level projections, the IPCC only included thermal expansion in their projections, because they could not agree upon the contribution of ice shelves and glaciers. Thermal expansion has accounted for 30% of sea level rise since then. I learned a number of interesting things that don't seem to be common knowledge. One thing is that sea levels are going to continue to rise significantly. The conditions for that have already been met. What's happening is that we have created the conditions for global warming, and we continue to increase the rate and the extent of that warming. That's what's physically happening. The fact that industries are taking positions doesn't change the underlying physics.
These objections are peripheral. The fact that the speaker is young does not make the message incorrect. Money is involved in all big policy issues, and institutions always promote their own interests, we don't learn anything from those facts. Can you provide evidence that we are not in the beginning of a mass extinction? Do you disagree that carbon sequestration technologies "barely exist"? Should we not be concerned about #tippingpoints?
i think i do, or at least i have faith that in a decade they will be fully-fledged. there are several different possible avenues and necessity is ever the mother of inventionDo you disagree that carbon sequestration technologies "barely exist"?
I think I've ranted before about how much more efficient it is to not burn carbon than it is to burn carbon to produce electricity to run equipment to sequester carbon... Obviously the goal is to use renewable energy and stop digging/drilling, but it pisses me off because half the articles want to conclude there's nothing wrong with fossil fuels as there's someone in a lab experimenting with sequestration. I wonder if a bog could be sped up to sequester carbon faster with a little bit of agg equipment.
The speaker is not an independent agent and is a proxy for a different group who’s motives are not clear, that should immediately raise some eyebrows. In any honest discussion of the agents message we should be looking at the agency behind the agent and trying to figure out what their angle is. Is climate change a problem, sure that’s pretty well established, but there are lots of groups out there that see it as an opportunity to make money or entrench their interests and we have to be highly cautious of that. Lots of the climate money is chasing ineffective solutions at a local level that have little impact to the overall climate change problem but add significant cost and regulatory burden. I have no idea what this Astro turf group is aiming to do but I would put money on climate change being simply a convenient vehicle for their objectives.
Capitalist theory presumes that if the need is real, efficient and effective solutions will drive out inefficient and ineffective solutions. The basic problem right now is that there is no economic case for climate solutions because the impact of industry on the environment has been historically externalized. From a legislative standpoint, the argument at hand is one of rewriting the equation over a longer time frame and across a broader system. Simply put, the argument is that the stakeholders of any physical process are anyone whose well-being is affected by the process. Which drags capitalism kicking and screaming into the socialist sphere which is why Western countries are fighting so hard.Is climate change a problem, sure that’s pretty well established, but there are lots of groups out there that see it as an opportunity to make money or entrench their interests and we have to be highly cautious of that. Lots of the climate money is chasing ineffective solutions at a local level that have little impact to the overall climate change problem but add significant cost and regulatory burden.
Which is probably near impossible to do with the political systems currently in place because the people writing the rules are the same people who are supposed to be dragged kicking and screaming to the finish line. Meanwhile half the players don’t have to follow any regulations at all. My biggest fear with all this climate stuff is that the western World ends up regulating itself to into an increasingly lower standard of living. We keep setting up more and more roadblock and regulations on domestic producers but allowing foreign ones a free pass, thereby getting rid of domestic jobs and eventually domestic knowledge. Countries like China will just cheat and use that as another competitive advantage. I dont worry about the actual climate change as much because that tipping point was reached probably a decade ago. It’s happened, it can’t really be stopped though it might be slowed down a bit. Resources would be better spent developing better trees, seeds and farming techniques than trying to setup a international regulatory framework for carbon in hopes of slowing down warming by a little bit. There are things like bunker oil burning that should straight up be banned but at the same time we shouldn’t go all climate nutter and ban natural gas heating.
A lower standard of living is precisely what the planet needs. I don't need strawberries from Guatemala, I need decent produce grown nearby. I don't need a $12 bluetooth headset from Shenzen that will crap out in a week, I need a $50 headset from Detroit that will last me five years. The problem right now is that economies of scale make globalization work because they externalize the impacts. Trade regulations are all about keeping countries from "cheating" - what you're complaining about, basically, is the toothlessness of international trade policing and this is exactly where we need to beef things up. Something everybody misses when discussing Piketty is he outlines chapter and verse the size of the shadow economy, and points out that the only real change made in the past 100 years was the US Treasury Dept pursuing black market funding. As a result, anonymous Swiss banking is effectively no more. Where there's a will there's a way and will is gathering. Bunker oil burning is banned as of January.
"molly Cyrus" is now a meme. Be careful, you're only a few steps away from Dinesh D'Souza.
Yes, because we're twenty, thirty, forty, possibly even older somethings that have such little influence on the world compared to her that we need to sling shit instead of looking in the mirror less our plans of getting drunk on the cruise ship be rudely interrupted. Good for her. She's smarter than any of us. And good for Miley too. At least when the catastrophe finally does hit these "teenagers" will have enough money to get to the Arctic Circle. Because even the people that claim to accept climate change don't believe in it. Good thing I gave up trying to be an activist. Now just learning to code, getting some tech money and stocking the bunker with expensive booze.
I think it's awesome that there are powerful institutions that benefit financially from slowing climate change. Maybe we can take advantage of their power to help us get something done about it. Who cares about the motivations involved, if the problem gets solved?